Check this page every month for some stimulating lectures and conversations from the leading scientific minds. We'll only be posting items that we have actually viewed or listened to ourselves, so we hope you enjoy these as much as we did.

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds

Wednesday, 16 September 2009 00:00

Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples' thoughts -- and judges their actions.

Dr. Alex Huk, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, talks about one way that the brain perceives 3-D motion. 3-D motion perception is critical to everyday life and survival. He and his fellow scientists, Bas Rokers and Larry Cormack, discovered that the brain processes 3-D motion in an area called MT+, long thought to only be responsible for processing 2-D motion.

MIT’s David Merrill demonstrating a technology called Siftables at the 2009 TED conference. Siftables are cookie-sized, computerized blocks you can stack and shuffle in your hands. By arranging them in different configurations or tilting them at different angles you can do math, play music, spell worlds, pour virtual paint, and more.

Biochemist Gregory Petsko makes a convincing argument that, in the next 50 years, we'll see an epidemic of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's, as the world population ages. His solution: more research into the brain and its functions.

In this fascinating lecture Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm, discusses Artificial Intelligence with specific reference to his Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) architecture, which attempts to mimic the basic functions of the human neocortex.